How
do they do it? They first crystallize the beverage on a microscope
slide, and then take pictures using a polarized light microscope with
a camera attached. As the light passes through the crystals, some
amazing colors and patterns show up. The result is pretty
mesmerizing. Read more.

Dry Martini

English Oatmeal Stout

Champagne

The
Dead Sea is a giant, super-saline lake at the lowest spot on Earth.
And its beaches appear to be pebbled with perfect little cubes of
salt. Crystal
solids with flat sides like salt are symmetrical in shape because
their molecules are arranged in a repeating pattern of positive and
negative ions; the bonds between these electrons and protons are
formed from electrostatic forces. Salt crystals are always
cube-shaped, though impurities
can cause crystals to grow into jagged chunks. Read more.

Located at NASA Ames Research Center in
Mountain View, California, a couple of miles from the Googleplex, the
machine is literally a black box, 10 feet high. It’s mostly a freezer,
and it contains a single, remarkable computer chip—based not on the
usual silicon but on tiny loops of niobium wire, cooled to a temperature
150 times colder than deep space. The name of the box, and also the
company that built it, is written in big, science-fiction-y letters on
one side: D-WAVE. Executives from the company that built it say that the
black box is the world’s first practical quantum computer, a device
that uses radical new physics to crunch numbers faster than any
comparable machine on earth. If they’re right, it’s a profound
breakthrough. The question is: Are they? Read more.

sexta-feira, 23 de maio de 2014

For the
first time ever, scientists have gathered direct
evidence that demonstrates a massive object with the
characteristics of a Wolf-Rayet star met its demise in a ferocious
Type IIb supernova explosion. Furthermore, they were able to capture
the event a mere 6 hours after the explosion was initiated. The
observations have been published in Nature. Read more.

Students still have time to join the ESA International Summer School on
GNSS, taking place in the Czech Republic this July. The 10-day course
will cover all aspects of satellite navigation, up to and including the
creation of a satnav-based business. More info.

Engineers
from Brigham
Young University (BYU) are developing extremely waterproof
surfaces that they believe could dramatically improve the efficiency
of both power plants and solar energy systems. These surfaces, called
superhydrophobic surfaces, are extremely difficult to wet since they
cause water to aggregate and form beads that sit on the surface.

If
you turn to nature you can see numerous examples of naturally
occurring superhydrophobic surfaces such as duck
feathers, butterfly wings and lotus leaves. These surfaces
efficiently repel water, causing it to clump together and form little
beads because it is more attracted to itself than the surface. These
surfaces have inspired many engineers in the field of biomimetics,
where scientists attempt to imitate elements of nature to solve
problems. Read more.

quarta-feira, 21 de maio de 2014

"Imagine
that the star originally formed rocky planets like Earth.
Furthermore, imagine that it also formed gas giant planets like
Jupiter," says Mack. "The rocky planets form in the region
close to the star where it is hot and the gas giants form in the
outer part of the planetary system where it is cold.

However, once
the gas giants are fully formed, they begin to migrate inward and, as
they do, their gravity begins to pull and tug on the inner rocky
planets. With the right amount of pulling and tugging, a gas giant
can easily force a rocky planet to plunge into the star. If enough
rocky planets fall into the star, they will stamp it with a
particular chemical signature that we can detect." Read more.

"Imagine
that the star originally formed rocky planets like Earth. Furthermore,
imagine that it also formed gas giant planets like Jupiter," says Mack.
"The rocky planets form in the region close to the star where it is hot
and the gas giants form in the outer part of the planetary system where
it is cold. However, once the gas giants are fully formed, they begin to
migrate inward and, as they do, their gravity begins to pull and tug on
the inner rocky planets. With the right amount of pulling and tugging, a
gas giant can easily force a rocky planet to plunge into the star. If
enough rocky planets fall into the star, they will stamp it with a
particular chemical signature that we can detect."Read more at http://www.iflscience.com/space/astronomers-have-identified-stars-eat-earth-planets#874HGxJuZ1ZzfdE7.99

"Imagine
that the star originally formed rocky planets like Earth. Furthermore,
imagine that it also formed gas giant planets like Jupiter," says Mack.
"The rocky planets form in the region close to the star where it is hot
and the gas giants form in the outer part of the planetary system where
it is cold. However, once the gas giants are fully formed, they begin to
migrate inward and, as they do, their gravity begins to pull and tug on
the inner rocky planets. With the right amount of pulling and tugging, a
gas giant can easily force a rocky planet to plunge into the star. If
enough rocky planets fall into the star, they will stamp it with a
particular chemical signature that we can detect."Read more at http://www.iflscience.com/space/astronomers-have-identified-stars-eat-earth-planets#874HGxJuZ1ZzfdE7.99

Nebula No. 10 (2011)

Scientists
from the UK Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) and UK
National Physical Laboratory (NPL) are in the process of developing a
novel navigation system for submarines, known as quantum
positioning, which could be 1000 times more accurate than current
systems.

The prototype is expected to be trialled on land in 2015 and,
if successful, the team hope that it could eventually be
commercialized and used in the civilian world. Read more.

All lectures are free and online at http://planetary.org/bettsclass
and you can earn a Certificate of Achievement for watching them. You
can learn more about the class on the same web page including syllabus
and assignments. More info.

quarta-feira, 14 de maio de 2014

Lucid
dreaming is the somewhat misleading name given to dreams where the
dreamer is aware that they are in fact dreaming. They are not
necessarily any clearer than other dreams, but the dreamer can often
consciously control the course of the dream, making for a more
intelligible
experience.

“Lucid
dreaming is a very good tool to observe what happens in the brain and
what is causally necessary for secondary consciousness,” says Voss.
She has found that the brainwaves produced by people who subsequently
report experiencing lucid dreams fall somewhere between those of
REM-sleep and wakefulness. The frontal and temporal lobes of the
brain, responsible for most of what we think of as higher thinking,
show lower frequency gamma waves, 25-40Hz, thought to be associated
with conscious attention.

terça-feira, 13 de maio de 2014

Biomathematician Steve Horvath has discovered a strikingly accurate way to measure human ageing through epigenetic signatures.

Horvath's clock emerges from epigenetics, the study of chemical and
structural modifications made to the genome that do not alter the DNA
sequence but that are passed along as cells divide and can influence how
genes are expressed. As cells age, the pattern of epigenetic
alterations shifts, and some of the changes seem to mark time. To
determine a person's age, Horvath explores data for hundreds of
far-flung positions on DNA from a sample of cells and notes how often
those positions are methylated — that is, have a methyl group attached.

He
has discovered an algorithm, based on the methylation status of a set
of these genomic positions, that provides a remarkably accurate age
estimate — not of the cells, but of the person the cells inhabit. Read more.

segunda-feira, 12 de maio de 2014

The rainbow effect is created when tiny ice crystals in the water
vapour of clouds reflect the sunlight at the exact right angle. The
sight is rare and has only ever been photographed a couple of times.Images: (L) Ken Rotberg (R) UC Santa Barbara Geography.

A new ESA app enables you to put your smartphone-controlled drone in the
place of Europe’s Rosetta spacecraft approaching its target comet. You
can try for a perfect landing on the comet while flying your drone for
real.

This updated version of the AstroDrone app – first released last year –
is part of a crowdsourcing project by ESA’s Advanced Concepts Team. By
gathering data from the drone’s sensors and movements, they aim to teach
robots how to navigate their environments. Read more.

Sen—A team of researchers has identified for the first time a star
directly related to the Sun, one almost certainly born from the same
cloud of gas and dust.

The find, led by astronomer Ivan Ramirez of The University of Texas,
will help astronomers look for other solar siblings. It could lead to an
understanding of how and where our Sun formed, and how our Solar System
became hospitable for life.

“We want to know where we were born,” Ramirez said. “If we can figure
out in what part of the galaxy the Sun formed, we can constrain
conditions on the early solar system. That could help us understand why
we are here.” Read more.

At the TEDx RocketMinds event 8 May, speakers presented their visions of
how our missions to Mars and beyond will create new opportunities,
linking science to business and to global issues. The event was livestreamed and can all be viewed again from here.

Sen—An international team of astronomers has measured the beat of a
distant pulsar one million times more precisely than has previously ever
been achieved.

The team used the interstellar medium between stars and galaxies,
that is made up of sparsely spread charged particles, as a giant lens to
magnify and look closely at the radio wave emission from the pulsar—a
small rotating neutron star. Read more.

MIT researchers have devised a novel cancer treatment that destroys
tumor cells by first disarming their defenses, then hitting them with a
lethal dose of DNA damage.

In studies with mice, the research team showed that this one-two
punch, which relies on a nanoparticle that carries two drugs and
releases them at different times, dramatically shrinks lung and breast
tumors. The MIT team, led by Michael Yaffe, the David H. Koch Professor
in Science, and Paula Hammond, the David H. Koch Professor in
Engineering, describe the findings in the May 8 online edition of Science Signaling. Read more.

domingo, 4 de maio de 2014

It's taken years, but physicists have finally filled in a persistent gap
in the periodic table. Eight years after the creation of element 118,
the heaviest known atom, researchers have made a few atoms of its
slightly lighter neighbor, element 117, by shooting an intense beam of
calcium ions into a target of berkelium. Besides sketching in the blank
space in the table, the discovery bolsters the notion of an "island of
stability," a group of superheavy nuclei still tantalizingly out of
reach that theorists predict may be as stable as more familiar elements. Read more.